Art History Graduate Student Alexandra Lyon on Studying Yiddish in Warsaw

A smiling blonde woman standing next to a sign in Polish and Yiddish.
This summer, I attended the 23rd International Summer Seminar in Yiddish Language and Culture at the Centrum Kultury Jidysz in Warsaw, Poland. I was part of the level two cohort and each day we spent four hours studying Yiddish. Our daily Yiddish lessons included a review of concepts like questions...

Malia Sayad

Malia S
Malia Sayad graduated from Illinois with a bachelor’s degree in political science with a concentration in International Relations. During her junior year, Malia was dismayed to see a sharp rise...

Funding Opportunities

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The Program in Jewish Culture & Society announces a call for applications for the Gendell/Shiner Family Fellowship, the Karasik Scholarship, and the Dick Abrams Scholarship. Applicants must be degree-seeking students in good academic standing enrolled at the University of Illinois.The Gendell/...

Introducing New Faculty: Rachelle Grossman

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Rachelle Grossman is an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative and World Literature. She is a specialist in Yiddish literature and print culture who received her PhD from Harvard University. Her current book manuscript discusses the transformation of...

Introducing New Faculty: Eli Rosenblatt

A man with dark hair, a beard, and glasses wearing a white button-up shirt is smiling at the camera.
Eli Rosenblatt joined the Department of Religion as an assistant professor in Fall 2024. His research and teaching illuminate Jewish texts, ideas, and practices in the 19th and 20th centuries, with a particular interest in the Caribbean and United States. His...

Harriet Murav's book talk

Book talk
On October 14, 2024, we had a great turnout for Harriet Murav's lecture on her recently published book, "As the Dust of the Earth: The Literature of Abandonment in Revolutionary Russia and Ukraine." From 1918 to 1922, as many as 40,000 Jews were killed in the pogroms of the Russian Civil War....

Research Spotlight: Alice Balestrino

A smiling brunette woman
Alice Balestrino is a PhD candidate in Italian Studies and The Initiative for the Holocaust, Genocide and Memory Studies. Her dissertation focuses on two Jewish authors who collaborated, to varying degrees, with fascism: Margherita Sarfatti and Gertrude Stein. Caught between resistance to the...

Israel Studies Project visitors

Israel Project visitors
The week of September 16, 2024, was full of adventures with our Israel Studies Project visitors, Judy Maltz, a senior correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, and Amit Schejter, a full professor of communication studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. A lunch with seniors at the...
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